


climb the fence, books and pens

by kickedshins



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Pre-Canon, Sparring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:02:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28510113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kickedshins/pseuds/kickedshins
Summary: “You owe it to me,” Camilla says, which is unfair, because Palamedes is nearly as devoted to her as she is to him, and it’s quite rude to tug on the strings of their friendship to puppet him into doing what she wants, but it’s effective.“You could have left here at any time,” Palamedes reminds her again.Camilla wouldn’t have. Camilla never does. She’s supposed to stay by his side, so stay by his side she will. And she’s usually a partner in his research, because her mind’s nearly as sharp as the daggers she so favors, but even when he gets all obsessive and caught up in his own mind as this, she doesn’t leave him.“I could have,” she says, and they know each other well enough that she doesn’t have to say anything else.orCamilla and Palamedes spar and chat to unwind after a stressful, unproductive day.
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	climb the fence, books and pens

**Author's Note:**

> i read the short story from cam's pov and i was like WOW it would suck to be a teen in the sixth house considering you've got all these hormones and like three people to deal with them with! so the weird date set-up and references to limitations on who people can and can't be with are all extrapolated and derived from that short story. 
> 
> i love these two. i love em a lot. there is something so personal to me about being in deep platonic love (...moirailship...) and simply understanding your friend better than anyone else ever could. 
> 
> title from 'we're going to be friends', by the white stripes. enjoy!

Palamedes is on his sixth-and-a-half consecutive hour of studying something-or-other under a microscope and muttering to himself about it, and Camilla is finding herself increasingly, incurably bored. She has a basic understanding of what he’s doing, but a basic understanding does not an interest make. So, sure, she could hold a conversation with him about this, but that would require him to talk to her, and in his current state, that’s a non-starter.

He gets like this sometimes, so absorbed in his work he does absolutely nothing else for a shockingly long amount of time. Fuck eating and sleeping; basic human needs are for the less intellectually-inclined. 

Camilla taps him on the shoulder a touch harder than is strictly necessary. 

He jolts away from his machine, glasses clattering against its metal and sliding halfway down his hooked nose. “Cam,” he says, her nickname an upsetting habit he’s picked up from his dear near-dead Dulcinea with her penchant for the diminutive. An affection that extends to the seven-years-her-junior-and-still-halfway-through-puberty Palamedes, Camilla supposes.

“Warden,” she replies. “It’s nearly midnight.”   


“Is it?” he asks, and then he says, absently, “I hadn’t noticed.”   


“Well, I had,” is Camilla’s rather blunt response. “You should be getting to bed soon, shouldn’t you.”   


“And not yourself?” he asks.

Camilla shrugs. “I was thinking of finding someone to fight with. Sitting at her necromancer’s side all day makes a cav a bit restless, if you could imagine.”

Palamedes’s face drops in apology. “I lost track of time,” he says, and then, “You could have left at any point.”

Camilla shrugs again, sharp and simple and to the point. “Probably. I shouldn’t have. I could have.”

“I’ve always found the sectioning of time arbitrary and unnecessary,” Palamedes says, and Camilla, who has heard this spiel about a hundred times, readjusts her perch on the chair next to him and just barely holds back an eye-roll. “You know, it takes the planet of the Sixth—”   


_ A thousand four hundred and eight hours _ , Camilla’s brain supplies, though she’s got the good sense enough to keep her mouth shut.

“—one thousand, four hundred, and exactly eight hours to complete a rotation on its axis,” Palamedes says. “There’s no reason to divide our ‘days’ into the twenty-four-hour-spans that they exist as, especially considering we, well, don’t experience any natural light here in the Library, so it’s not as if we could see Dominicus—or lack of it—in the first place.”   


“I know, Warden,” Camilla says. “Imperial authority. What can you do.”

“Nothing, apparently,” Palamedes almost-spits at his microscope.

Camilla puts a hand on his shoulder. It’s not a soft hand, and she wouldn’t at all classify it as a comforting one, but it’s a way to remind him that she’s there and she’s going to hold him steady forever and ever. 

He relaxes back into her touch, a quarter-day-long buildup of tense muscles (not that he’s really got  _ muscles _ , but, well, he has to have  _ something  _ in him that holds up his bones, and though Camilla’s positive he’s halfway to becoming a proper walking tendon, he’s still not fully finished growing, and is still a touch too short to be seen as simply a construct of elbows and ligaments) bleeding out of his gray shirt. 

His cloak sits on the other side of the room, discarded about four hours ago; his sharp gray scholar’s shoes are off, too. Despite his minor-league qualms about germs (ironic, considering his passion project’s focus on a terminal illness), a lifetime of being alongside Camilla has gotten him into the habit of kicking off his shoes when he needs to think. It’s good for grounding, quite literally. It reminds her of things outside of herself when she needs to calm down, and for him, it seems to get him either out of his own head when he’s near a breaking point, or back into it if he’s finding himself easily distracted.

“You made progress,” she tells him.

“I did not,” he says, petulantly, because he’s fifteen, and sometimes—rarely, once in a proper Sixth House day—he shows it. “I worked for almost six hours on a train of thought and then hit a dead end. I wasted time.”

His voice is desperate, near-broken as he says that, and Camilla is overcome with the urge to smack some sense into him.

“You eliminated a possible path. That’s not a waste of time. That’s insurance. That means you’re not going to waste time on a futile attempt later.”

“I suppose,” Palamedes grumbles. He puts his head in his hands, carding his fingers through his hair, causing it to stick up and become as disheveled as it is first thing in the morning. “It just feels…”

“I know,” Camilla says simply, because she does. She gets it. “You can try again tomorrow.”

“I can’t. Archivist Zeta has some new project that she wants us on for the majority of tomorrow, remember? Knowing her, it’ll take at least an hour or two longer than anticipated, and I can almost never pull the  _ Master Warden  _ card on her because— well, you know.”

Camilla does, of course. “I meant in the afternoon. Or late at night. Curfew has never stopped you before.”

“True,” he acknowledges. Once again the two of them spit in the face of the concept of time. “But I’m going to be exhausted.”

“What, from a research project with Zeta? I’ll do the heavy lifting if your arms can’t handle heavy tomes.”

“Ha, ha,” Palamedes says. He snakes a leg out to kick her in the kneecap, but she hops off her seat with fluid grace and avoids his wildly-off-target swing. “Make fun of the necro who spends his days researching how to save a dying woman. Classy, Hect.”

Camilla steps around to his other side and pulls his hands away from his face, forcing him to look up at her. She takes away his thick glasses—really, shouldn’t the Sixth House have figured out how to breed out something as ridiculously useless as the mutation that is poor eyesight centuries ago?—and he squints, because his eyesight is incredibly shitty, and his glasses are incredibly thick.

“Give those back,” he says.

She hangs on to them for just a second, forcing his undivided attention on her. “You know, I spend time researching, too. Plenty of it. I just also manage to find the time to do a workout or two every so often.”   


“I’ve woken up to you doing sit-ups.”

“Yes. They’re a good way to get the blood flowing in the morning. Maybe you’d have less of a premature and strict caffeine dependency if you—”

“By the Necrolord Prime, Camilla, I am not going to start working out with you in the morning,” Palamedes groans.

Which is fine. It’s a losing battle, but Camilla fights it anyway, because she sincerely believes that everyone should be able to defend themself in the most basic of ways. One of her qualms—and she’s got quite a few—with the Sixth House, with the Nine Houses on the whole, is this strict compartmentalization of people. So what if Palamedes is supposedly going to be destined for a lifetime of archival referrals and the Dewey Decimal system? If anything at all changes that, he should at least know how to throw a punch.

Which is why Camilla says, “Come spar a round with me before we go off to bed.”   


“Absolutely not,” Palamedes insists. He goes to snatch back his glasses; Camilla lets him. “I don’t need to end my already shitty day with getting my ass thoroughly beaten by my own cavalier.”

“You owe it to me,” Camilla says, which is unfair, because Palamedes is nearly as devoted to her as she is to him, and it’s quite rude to tug on the strings of their friendship to puppet him into doing what she wants, but it’s effective. 

“You could have left here at any time,” Palamedes reminds her again.

Camilla wouldn’t have. Camilla never does. She’s supposed to stay by his side, so stay by his side she will. And she’s usually a partner in his research, because her mind’s nearly as sharp as the daggers she so favors, but even when he gets all obsessive and caught up in his own mind as this, she doesn’t leave him.

“I could have,” she says, and they know each other well enough that she doesn’t have to say anything else.

“Alright,” he concedes. “But just one round. And I’m only doing this because you’ve spent the evening getting tenser and tenser.”

“Rich, coming from you, Warden,” Camilla says dryly.

He sucks in one cheek, biting it hard, and raises an eyebrow at her. She responds by quirking her lip upward, and he admits defeat with a sigh. “You got dinner, yes?” he asks.

“I did,” she says. She points to a still-full plate on a nearby lab table. “You didn’t.”

“Fuck,” he says.

“Fuck,” she echoes sarcastically.

“I’m going to be weak and tired for this fight, so go easy on me.”   


“I was always planning on going easy on you,” Camilla assures him. She gathers his cloak from where it’s resting over a chair and watches as he attempts to jam his feet into his shoes without shoehorning them in with his fingers. It takes a second, but he manages.

“You do wonders for my ego, Cam.”   


“I do,” she agrees. “Without me, your head would have inflated enough that you would have floated away.”

“I can’t float away,” he counters. He’s a blur as he puts away his experiments and machinery with the comfort and speed that comes from years of practiced setup and cleanup. “The Library’s ceiling would keep me in.”   


“You’d manage to push past it,” Camilla says. “You always do defy the Library’s expectations and bounds.”   


“Careful,” he warns half-jokingly. “Don’t let the bureaucrats hear you spout slander about our House.”

“You are the bureaucrat in question, Warden. You realize that, yes?”

Palamedes inhales deeply, holds it for a second—Camilla can see his ribs, hidden under his simple gray shirt, in her mind’s eye, each one of them pressing out against his skin as his lungs inflate—and lets it out slow as anything. “When I’m older,” he promises, “I’m going to make some real changes around here.”   


“I know,” Camilla says, not because she’s trying to shut him up, but because she sincerely does believe that. He’s a good scholar, a good friend, a good man; the Sixth House needs more of that last one, she thinks. The Sixth House—the Empire, really—is held back by tradition, and though Palamedes is not in any way a hundred and fifteen pounds of upheaval, he’s a leap and a bound in the right direction. 

But for now, he’s still fifteen. For now, despite being the Master Warden of the Library, he’s a kid. For now, he’s got hurdles to jump over and red tape holding him back, and sometimes Camilla wishes she could take her daggers and slash them to ribbons.

A bit of a tussle will clear her head. “Hurry up,” she says.

Palamedes puts away the last of his devices and plucks his cloak from her hands. Swinging it around his shoulders, he says, “So, where were you planning on fracturing my bones?”

“In your tibia, probably,” Camilla says. “Or maybe your ribs.”

Palamedes looks at her over the frames of his glasses.

“We’ll go to one of the cav training rooms,” Camilla tells him. 

They don’t spar often, mostly because Palamedes really fucking sucks at it, and it’s not that fun of a fight for Camilla if her opponent is entirely useless. But on the occasions that they do, it’s always an interesting dance between necromancy and sheer physical prowess. Each time they fight, Palamedes has another trick up his sleeve. One of these days, Camilla thinks, he might be able to last more than a minute or so against her.

The Master Warden isn’t technically supposed to be engaging in combat with his Hand, but, quite frankly, he’s the Master Warden, and he can usually use that position of power to his advantage. Besides, if pressed, Camilla could easily spin some story about an independent research project, and she’s sure that would be more than acceptable to any good member of the Sixth.

The Library is a vast structure, far too big for the dwindling amount of people inside of it. Camilla and Palamedes traverse across it in amiable silence. Camilla knows the ins and outs of it better than most, she’s sure, because she’s spent quite a lot of time poking around in ways that were not strictly authorized. She doesn’t quite feel about reminiscing about the House’s collective sepulcher, though, not when she’s getting a tingling in her feet as she shifts her weight from side to side, fingers twitching, antsy for a fight.

Camilla’s not a creature of bloodlust, not by any stretch of the imagination, but she sure as hell is no  _ I-could-spend-twenty-four-hours-straight-reading-the-same-dense-informative-tome _ Palamedes Sextus. And ever since Palamedes became Master Warden and acquired a whole new array of Wardenly duties to which he must attend, Camilla has had less opportunities to get into a good fight with another cavalier. She makes do with punching bags and treadmills and the like, but there’s nothing as deliciously heartrate-increasing as a decent fight, two people against each other.

Many people have asked her why she’s never expressed an interest in things such as dueling tournaments or the Cohort. She’s fielded questions from Zeta alone a million times over, because the woman does not know how to separate the personal and the professional, overfamiliar with acquaintances and distant sans academic endeavors from her own son. 

The answers are simple. She hasn’t participated in any dueling contests because she doesn’t particularly see the value in all the rules and regulations that tie fighters up. Sixth House training itself is bone-chillingly boring and regulated, acting as if her opponents will forever obey the rules of combat and never stray beyond their bounds. It’s mind-numbing in its idealistic idiocy. Camilla knows in a real fight, a fight for her life, she’d be able to hold her own. She can’t safely say the same about the rest of her House. Which is not to say that she dislikes them all, or even thinks them incompetent. She just thinks that they’re operating in a system that does not let them adequately help themselves.

As for why she’s never been interested in joining the Cohort, she simply sees no point in leaving to go die in a pointless war. Besides, joining the Cohort would mean leaving Palamedes (who would never, ever entertain the idea of giving up on his research for Dulcinea, research that he sure as hell would not be able to continue on the frontlines), so the idea itself is a nonstarter.

Palamedes pushes open the doors to a cavalier training room. It’s got an open space in the center for dueling, as well as some weapons racks and assorted workout gear scattered around the perimeter. Because it’s midnight at this point, it’s vacant save for the two of them.

Camilla kicks off her shoes, slate-gray inventions that let her walk lightly but unfortunately add not even a half-inch to her already tiny height, and flings them from her feet with precision at a stack of weights in the corner. Palamedes does not, largely because they both know he’ll slip if he attempts to fight her in socks, and there’s no way he’s putting his bare feet on the ground that people not only walk on but sweat on. Also, he likes the inch that they give him, even without the inserts he pretends he doesn’t wear. Camilla always tells him that his biological mother is a willow reed and his biological father is a tree and he’s certainly going to grow to be their height someday, but Palamedes always frets that he’s a genetic anomaly that’s going to stay five-five for the rest of his life instead of just being a late bloomer.

He drapes his cloak—so necromancer not-quite-chic, a drabber shade of gray than his shirt and a lighter one than his pants—over a piece of workout equipment with care, making sure the ends of it don’t drag on the floor. He pushes down the ends of his glasses, hooking them more firmly around the backs of his ears to ensure they don’t go flying off his face, and he tugs the cloth belt holding up his cloth pants a touch tighter.

Camilla, on her part, is ready to go. She’s in a gray tank top and pants, and her hair was cut recently, the line of it sitting at just above her chin, so it’s too short to tie back even if she wanted to. She bounces from one foot to the next, stalking to the middle of the clear space made for fighting, and rotates her wrists forwards and backward.

Palamedes makes a face at that. He’s a bit disturbed by her hypermobility, which Camilla has always thought is an absurd hang-up to have, because he can hyperextend his elbows, and also he’s rather intimate with bodies and the way they’re laid out. It’s strange for a necromancer to be squeamish about joints, but Camilla supposes everyone has their quiddities.

“No weapons,” he says.

“Of course,” Camilla assures him. He’s passably okay with a rapier if he’s fighting a Camilla who’s got one eye shut, but even then she can take him down easily. She’d never want to actually hurt him just to blow off some steam.

“And I won’t harm you, either,” he assures her.

“I doubt you could, Warden, but I appreciate your caution.”

Palamedes gives a grand roll of his eyes that genuinely impresses Camilla. He drops into an imitation of a fighting stance, one that was clearly learned more from diagrams than from actual practice, and runs a hand through his hair, pushing it back over the top of his head. It’s getting a little long. He should probably cut it soon.

Camilla’s knee pops as she settles into an easy crouch, the joint a bit stiff from a day of doing essentially nothing. She shifts her weight forward, puts up her hands, and waits for Palamedes to make the first move.

He seems a bit at a loss. She sighs.

“Raise a skeleton,” she suggests. “Throw it at me.”

He wrinkles his nose, the movement pushing his glasses up. “That’s so… Ninth,” he says, in the same tone one might say  _ You spilled coffee on an ancient manuscript _ .

Camilla launches forward, ready to sweep his legs out from under him. She’s a sharp fighter, fast and wild, and she doesn’t stay in the strict lines and motions that things like a dueling tournament would expect.

Unfortunately, Palamedes knows her well, and knows that she’s tricky. He puts a hand out, pushing away from him, towards her knee—must have heard it pop when she settled, perceptive bastard—effectively locking it in place. Of course, he doesn’t need to do the fancy hand motion, but he still hasn’t entirely shaken the habit of pointing his hands where he wants his power to go.

Palamedes has a fondness for cells. He comes by it naturally, considering the object of his desire has such desperately failing ones. It’s hours of inexhaustive research that get him to be so familiar with them, so comfortable with them to the point that he can halt Camilla’s movement at the source.

Still, he’s young and unpracticed, and Camilla is a force of muscle and determination. It takes a second, but she pushes free from his necromantic hold. By that point, though, he’s run out of reach of her body, resetting at the other side of the gym, hands twitching in excitement.

He’s such a liar to say he doesn’t get a thrill out of this. He  _ loves  _ it, and Camilla knows it. As egotistical as he can be when it comes to books and research and everything that’s unilaterally Sixth in nature, he loves a good challenge, and he loves when Camilla pushes him.

Palamedes fumbles for something at his belt, or maybe in his pocket. As she rushes him, Camilla asks, “So, you never answered why you couldn’t spend time tomorrow working on your research for– working on your independent study. After our obligations to Zeta for the day are fulfilled, I mean.”

She throws a punch, and she throws it lightly, hoping that he’ll try to catch it himself. And he does, snaking an arm up to intercept her own, his skin just a bit cold to the touch. “It’s a long story,” he says. “I’m sure you’d be bored to tears.” He flips his arm outward, circling her punch down, and with his other hand, he jabs at her side.

Camilla deftly steps out of the way. “Good go,” she says.

He looks a bit taken aback at the praise. “Why, thank you.”

“Now tell me your story, Warden,” she insists. “You know you shouldn’t keep big secrets from your Hand.”

He’s fumbling again for something in his pocket, and Camilla knows she could easily push him over and pin him right now, but she’s honestly pretty curious to see where this goes—and to get some conversation from him—so she hangs back.

“Er, it’s a date, if you’d believe it,” he says, still focused on his hands instead of hers, which is a rookie mistake and honestly idiotic, so she proves that to him by kicking at his foot.

He slips, nearly sliding into a split, but manages to hold himself upright. “Ow,” he says emphatically.

He rolls out of the way of her next attack, a bit clumsy, but she lets him go. As he gets to his feet, she comes at him again. “A date?” she asks, and she swings a fist down to his stomach.

He intercepts it with his leg, which seems to hurt him a lot, but it doesn’t incapacitate him. And the feeling of his bones against her knuckles jars her, so she’s not expecting it when he slaps some weirdly-textured brown thing against her right wrist and grabs her left, pulling it towards the first.

“My– Archivist Zeta set it up for me,” he says.

She pushes against his grasp, her arm easily stronger than his, but the feeling of something growing up her right wrist causes her focus to drop for just a second long enough for him to push her wrists together in front of her. The weird growing feeling against her wrists increases, and she drops her gaze from his gray eyes to her arms, the brown of her skin upsettingly drained-looking from a lifetime of quite literally never having contact with natural light.

There’s  _ wood  _ against her. Actual real wood, which is a rarity to say the least, but she supposes that being Master Warden of the Library has some perks. Such as access to wood. 

There’s wood against her, and it’s growing.

“What the fuck,” she says.

“Thalergy,” is Palamedes’s smug response. Of course. His specialty. “Everything’s got it, as you know. And if it exists, it can be manipulated.”

Camilla tries to wrest her hands free, but the wood holds firm. It creeps up the back of her hands, up towards her dextrous fingers and bitten-down nails, and she swears again in frustration.

Palamedes makes a broken-off  _ ah _ sound, and Camilla looks up to see a bit of blood dribbling from his mouth. He sticks a finger inside and gathers some blood on it and paints a hasty symbol on his palm.

Camilla swings at him with her hands-turned-wooden-club, but she’s not familiar with the weight of her hands and the lack of mobility that she’s suffering from, and her shoulders shout in protest as she attempts to twist her arms in a direction they very much do not want to be going. “Shit,” she says. And then, “The date?”   


Palamedes rushes off in another direction, and Camilla follows, but she forgets that her hands are bound together and ends up swinging them back into her own stomach as she attempts to pump her arms. “ _ Shit _ ,” she says again, louder this time, as she falls backward and hits the ground, unable to catch herself and stop her fall.

“The date’s with Diana,” he says. “Diana Sheish.”

There are not that many people that Palamedes might be being set up on a date with. About four, actually, considering that there’s an extremely limited amount of people his age with whom he might be able to reproduce in the future. So Camilla knows exactly who he’s talking about. “You like her?” she asks, wriggling her way up to standing.

“Not really,” Palamedes says. “If I had to pick someone, I think I’d probably go for—

“—Lucas,” she finishes, because she’s heard Palamedes talk about his hands enough times to last her whole life.

“Yeah,” he says. “But, I mean, that’s. Well. Romantic endeavors are—”

Camilla cuts him off with another attack. She swings her makeshift cudgel down at him. 

The thing about Palamedes is he’s brilliant, but occasionally forgetful and short-sighted, and his life flashes in his storm-gray eyes as she swings down with the weapon he’s so kindly provided to her. He throws his hand up, the one with the blood on it, and Camilla hits an invisible barrier.

Damn blood wards.

She pulls back and swings again. If there’s no around, she’s got to go through. As she’s attacking, she says, largely in hopes to distract him and get him to put his guard down, “You can want to be involved with someone even if neither of you are planning on having children together.”   


It’s a deeply un-Sixth idea to be with someone for genuine romantic reasons, but Palamedes has always been a bit of a disruptor. Still, he shakes his head in a fervent  _ no, thanks _ , and pushes back against her with even more strength.

“Maybe. Maybe I’ll say something to him. At some point.”   


“And maybe your date with Diana Sheish will go so brilliantly that the two of you will want to go straight to incubating,” Camilla says, coming down hard with another strike.

Palamedes looks a little green around the gills at that, his face contorting in a way that Camilla can’t help but let out a short bark of laughter at. “I think not,” he says.

Camilla hits again, and while the ward doesn’t budge, the wood encasing her hands splinters. She pulls outward, heaving with effort, and finally breaks free.

After that, it’s pretty much over for Palamedes. His ward weakened, the wood on the floor and far enough away from Camilla’s feet that it’d be difficult for him to manipulate it in any way that might meaningfully stop her, and Camilla’s fist aching for contact, Camilla throws a punch at him again.

He catches it with his arm, same as before, but instead of letting him twist her hand down, Camilla grabs his palm in hers and pushes a thumb through the mark of blood there, flaking his ward away with her fingertip. 

“Dammit,” he says, eyes wide.

She flashes a wicked grin and takes him to the ground.

He thrashes for a second, and Camilla even feels the wood begin to wrap its way around her ankle, but it’s futile. She’s got him pinned, and after a few seconds, he says, “You win.”

Camilla removes her knee from where it’s holding his arm to the ground and gets up off of him. Extending a hand to pull him up, she says, “I hope I didn’t bruise you up for your date tomorrow.”

“I’ll be fine,” he says, letting her haul him to standing. “Besides, I’m more than okay with the date not going so well. I’ll just make sure to shoot down any and all of her ideas and she’ll be sure to hate me.”

Dates, Camilla thinks, are ridiculous and wholly not needed, because it’s not as if the necros are going to enter into a loving marriage, or anything. They just need to make sure the Sixth House doesn’t die out, and better to do that with someone you find enjoyable enough. Hence the ridiculous dates. But considering that Palamedes has spent his years around the same small group of people his age, Camilla is pretty sure he knows them well enough at this point to know what they’re like without a sit-down coffee and discussion of some theorem or another to solidify those feelings.

Still, she’s excited to be able to tease him about it afterward. And maybe if he  _ does  _ end up ever asking that boy he finds attractive to– Camilla doesn’t know, to work on some skeleton identification, or something, with him, Camilla’ll have even more teasing material in her arsenal.

She knows it’s never going to happen, of course. Palamedes going for coffee with a girl or having an attraction to a boy means nothing, because, well, Dulcinea.

It’s cute that the older members of the Sixth House think they’ll get this boy—this ridiculous boy, this obstinate teen, this gray-eyed warrior of a scholar with a written-out, detailed plan to marry a woman he’s never even met in person—to entertain the idea of even temporarily coupling with someone. Camilla can’t help but applaud their fruitless attempts.

Palamedes rolls his shoulder backward, hissing softly.

“You alright?” Camilla asks.

He waves off her concern. “I’m fine. Nothing a bit of rest won’t fix. And you…?”

Camilla’s fingers are cut up and bloody, the skin torn up and jabbed through with a few splinters. It’s inconvenient, but she’ll live. She tucks her hands into her pants pockets and says, 

“I’m alright.”

“You’re not,” Palamedes says. He holds out his hands expectantly.

“Warden. Really?”   


“Camilla…”   


She sighs. “Fine.” She offers up her hands to him and refuses to look him in the eye.

Palamedes pulls out the bits of wood that he can, and the ones that he can’t get his fingers on, he pulls at with thalergenic power. They fall out of her hands and land against the floor.

“You want me to pick those up?” she asks.

“I’ll grab everything in a second,” he assures her. “I need to remake the ball of wood it originally was, but I can do that when I’m in bed tonight.”

Tightening his grip on her hands, his eyes flutter shut, and Camilla feels a tingling that starts at the tops of her arms and rushes down to the ends of her fingers, lighting her up with heat and energy. 

Thalergy. Healing. It’s something not many necros are adept at, especially not Sixth House necros. Palamedes specializes in psyochometry, of course, but his thalergenic manipulation skills for the purpose of healing are bounds above what anyone else Camilla’s ever met can do.  _ He really thinks he can fix her one day, doesn’t he? _

Her skin pulls itself back together, healing relatively quickly. Unfortunately, he heals over some of her callouses, too.

By the time he’s done, Palamedes has the startings of a nose bleed, and he wipes at it with his already-bloodied hand, getting some droplets on his already-bloodied chin. He’s a mess, defeated, breathing heavy, and he’s smiling. 

Palamedes needs stuff like this sometimes, even if he won’t admit it. Scratch that: even if he won’t recognize it. He needs to get out his energy in a physical way, needs to unwind, needs to let out his academic frustration on something tangible. 

Camilla gets this. She gets him. She knows that sometimes he needs to become a wreck, sweaty and dotted with blood, not at all the put-together Master Warden of the Library. And right now, he’s every inch an average teenage boy who’d just gotten into a brawl. Camilla can’t help but grin.

“You put up a good fight,” she says sincerely. “The wood– that was a neat trick.”

“Thanks,” he says. “I’m going to get better at it, you know.”   


Camilla pats him on the shoulder once, swiftly, affectionately. “I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> lucas and diana are both random latin-in-origin names. 'sheish' is a transliteration of the hebrew word for 'six' because i am jewish and uncreative. do not come at me for my lack of understanding of how necromancy works i just made shit up and went for it okay. i think i might actually write a griddlehark coffee shop au one day which would be fun. also this is not relevant to the story but both cam and pal are bi in my heart mostly cuz im in love with both of them. also i gave pal a bit of a germ aversion as a treat for my ocd self <3 
> 
> if you wanna suggest things for potential future fics or just to chat or enjoy my lovely tweets you can find me @ kickdshins on twitter :p and thanks for reading! kudos and comments are always appreciated <3


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